MonkWerks is a Flash-based social word-game released on Facebook (and subsequently on iPhone) by Monkey Gods, the latest venture created by the founders of Naughty Dog and Flektor, and apparently yet another one I’m involved with. 🙂

The game had been a blast to work on, particularly because it allowed me to run wild and take advantage of my “one-man-band” approach and skill-set to a great extent. I either created or somehow ended up being involved with virtually every single piece of art and animation in the game, I made some pretty complex and elaborate effect setups (like the page-turn effect or the melting candle), and I had the chance to do quite a bit of additional programming as well (the entire main menu and supporting effects, the loader, the control panel, some vector-to-bitmap conversion classes, etc.)

One especially interesting aspect of the artwork development was the conversion of the great monk-sketches done by comic-artist extraordinaire Jeff Matsuda into super-clean and efficient, very small memory-footprint Flash vector graphics, yet still match the originals as closely as possible. This process is pretty well illustrated in the gallery below, and I think the results speak for themselves.

Note: I had to strip Flash content, as it didn’t work anymore, but even as-is this is an interesting sneak-peek into a game from the very advent of browser-based social network games.